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Confinement framework for encapsulating objects

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Abstract

Confinement is used to prohibit safety-critical objects from unintended access. Approaches for specifying and verifying confinement have been proposed in the last twenty years but their application has been help back. We develop a novel framework for specifying and verifying object confinement in object-oriented (OO) programs. Instead of expressing the confinement requirements within a class for possible future usage, as with ownership types, we specify confinement requirements of the class in its usage class which actually intends to confine the parts, i.e., internal representations. Syntactically, an optional conf clause is introduced in class declarations for annotating the confined attribute-paths. A “same type and confinement” notation is introduced for expressing type and confinement dependence among variables, parameters, and return values of methods. Based on the extension to a Java-like language and existing techniques of alias analysis, we define a sound type-system for checking the well-confinedness of OO programs with respect to the confinement specifications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LMAM and Department of Informatics, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Qin Shu & Zongyan Qiu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Shuling Wang

Authors
  1. Qin Shu
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  2. Zongyan Qiu
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  3. Shuling Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qin Shu.

Additional information

Qin Shu is a researcher in the Department of Informatics, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University. Her research interests include semantics, specification, and object confinement of object-oriented programs. She received her BS from Harbin Institute Technology of Institute in 2006, and received her PhD from Peking University in 2012.

Zongyan Qiu is a professor in the Department of Informatics, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University. His research interests include formal methods, semantics of programming languages, and specification and verification of programs, especially for OO languages and programs. He received his MSc from Peking university. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Shuling Wang is an assistant research professor at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS). She received her PhD in 2008 from the School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, and since then, she has been a postdoc research fellow at UNU-IIST and ISCAS. Her current research is in hybrid systems and object-oriented programs, both related to formal modelling, semantics, and verification.

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Shu, Q., Qiu, Z. & Wang, S. Confinement framework for encapsulating objects. Front. Comput. Sci. 7, 236–256 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-1259-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-1259-7

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